July 31st, 2012

This month’s group of games was very unconventional! All focused on singing, yelling, whistling, and making all sorts of noises. We had everything from roaring dragons to glass shattering resonance frequencies!

All this audio input made for some really interesting games, let’s take a look at these 6 games:

Tone death – wow, I really actually enjoyed this game a lot! Fun times, even though I’m really really bad at it! I’m showing this to other people, for sure. I’d love to see the source code for this, as it’s a flixel game and I use flixel all the time!

Dragon – well, it’s my game so I won’t comment other than I worked hard with the time I had.

Audio Pong – Found myself playing this game a lot longer than I thought I would! Some errors in collision, but not often, I think perhaps I was changing my pitch too quickly. Solid reimagining of pong.

Whistle Wave – Hard. Really hard. I love the ground shifting with the sound, though. Definitely would like to see that effect happen in a game again someday.

Earwormz – I couldn’t get this game to do much! I believe that, having played the others, I am just not a very good sound producer, haha.

Super Nirvana – I played the android version of this. Honestly, sometimes I have to be reminded to stay silent, so it was a nice few minutes of ‘mandatory’ quiet time. Visuals were great, but I think I would have liked with a little more ‘game’.

Tone Death: lots of fun! I found the detection accuracy pretty good (I’m running a netbook with a built-in mic), although as things speed up in the game pretty quickly it became harder to tell whether I was offkey or just not being detected at all (so do I change my pitch or do I move my head closer/further from the mic!). I’m going to keep playing this until I get better!

Dragon – quite simple, although I found it difficult to control/predict whether I would get a fireball or a firebreath. The only game to combine regular controls and audio input! I’d like to see more ideas like this that focus on augmenting existing controls rather than replacing them with audio/voice input.

Audio Pong – maybe it was just my setup but I could not get the paddle to move except in very small tiny jumps – I lost every game with zero score.

Whistle Wave – I can’t believe this didn’t get named “Sound Wave”! Really hard, as other comments have said, and difficult to really control accurately (again maybe just my setup) – does my amplitude affect the size of the ground movements or only the pitch? The combination of pitch and timing and the physical inertia of the guys on the screen makes this a unique challenge. I found the game music to interfere with the detection of my own whistling however. (I found similar while developing my game, which is why it is entirely silent)

Earwormz – my game – I think it probably suffered from poor documentation/instructions? It doesn’t seem to have been intuitive to play from feedback I’ve received! The control scheme is a combination of audio pong and dragon essentially – whistle and then blow!

Super Nirvana Extreme – haha, great idea, twist the preconceptions and have a bit of fun doing so. Nicely polished too. I played the Android version, first time I’d played an Android egp entry. Definitely inspired me to tackle Android for my future entries, too.

After playing Arkanoise, I realised that this shares the same control scheme as Audio Pong: the audio is translate to an absolute bat position, not a direction/velocity. Once I realised that I went back and played Audio Pong some more, it works fine!

I think that translating inputs into absolute positions for games like these makes the control system actually quite hard (you need to be more exact, and any extraneous background noises sends your bat instantly into an unexpected position)!

Quite a diverse selection of languages/frameworks. Developers – which frameworks do you think support ‘audio input’ control schemes the best? Is this the domain of web/browser-based technologies or are local/native implementations easier or better?

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We're a group of indie game developers, running a friendly competition every month. The rules: Make a game based on the month's theme, and don't spend more than 7 days. New games posted at the end of every month.